Map and Compass

March 5, 2006

Your feedback has sent me a wake-up call: you want more structure and guidance. I screwed up. I am so enthralled with informal learning that I wanted our Unworkshop to be the poster child for its principles. This clouded my judgment. Before our first session, Dave Lee advised me to insert more structure but I blithely ignored him. I unrealistically thought that our community would grow organically. Live and learn. We don’t have time to trust evolution to do its magic. I’ll provide more clarity from now on. Sorry for the confusion.

Two weeks from now, each of us should have learned enough about a variety of web tools to know when and how to apply them in business learning situations.

We’re going to do that by experimenting with blogs, wikis, aggregators, tags, RSS, discussion boards, and podcasts.

First, Dave or I will provide an overview and put things in context in our group session.

You will visit examples and, often, use the technology of the day to gain hands-on familiarity.

Do some of your experimentation with others. I assure you that you’ll learn a lot more than doing everything on your own.

Take a look at the Resources pages on the wiki. I don’t expect you to read all this stuff, but some of it will be useful when you return to real life, so I want you to be familiar with what’s there.

Write an entry in your blog to document your thoughts about the role this particular technology might play in your project.

Project? Yes, you need a project. We talked about this on Day One but I haven’t reinforced the concept. Pick a situation, real or imagined, that represents a business need for learning. This could involve the work force or customers or your clients. It might be support for a community of practice or introducing a new product. Choose a project that’s rich enough that you’ll be able to address whether there’s a role to be played by blogs, wikis, etc. Post a brief description of your project on your blog. That way, we’ll become aware of one another’s projects when we read them on the aggregator.